Best Nonfiction Books of 2013

Smart folks in business follow a simple motto: always be learning. There are many ways to go about it, but cracking open an insightful read is rarely a bad idea (at least in my experience). Here's a selection of the year's best books.

From a poet serving time in a Chinese prison to a farmer making cheese in a Spanish cave, from hurricane Katrina to the onset of World War I, this year's best nonfiction titles range far and wide, featuring stories that are tragic and funny, moving and transporting.

by Maria Popova How to think like Sherlock Holmes, make better mistakes, master the pace of productivity, find fulfilling work, stay sane, and more. After the best biographies, memoirs, and history books of 2013, the season's subjective selection of best-of reading lists continue with the most stimulating psychology and philosophy books published this year.

Welcome to the 13th annual edition of strategy+business 's best business books. Every year we strive to assemble a reading list that will not only engross and entertain you, but also provide concepts, tools, and insights that can help you lead your company to a better future.

by Maria Popova From Alan Turing to Susan Sontag, by way of a lost cat, a fierce Victorian lady-journalist, and some very odd creative habits. It's that time of year again, the time for those highly subjective, grossly non-exhaustive, yet inevitable and invariably fun best-of reading lists.

The best books of 2013, chosen by Publishers Weekly editors. The best books in fiction, mysteries, memoirs, romance, comics, kids books, and more.

Announcing the best books of the year! The Goodreads Choice Awards are the only major book awards decided by readers.

The year's notable fiction, poetry and nonfiction, selected by the editors of The New York Times Book Review. FICTION & POETRY THE ACCURSED. By Joyce Carol Oates. (Ecco/HarperCollins, $27.99.) Oates's extravagantly horrifying, funny and prolix postmodern Gothic novel purports to be the definitive account of a curse that infected bucolic Princeton, N.J., in 1905 and 1906.

Jennifer Ouellette is a science writer who loves to indulge her inner geek by finding quirky connections between physics, popular culture, and the world at large. Follow on Twitter@JenLucPiquant. It's that time of year again, when bibliophiles scour their groaning bookcases and pluck out the best reads of the year, just in time for the holiday shopping season.

There were more strong candidates this year than usual. The order here is more or less the order I read them in, not the order of preference: Jeremy Adelman, Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschmann. Daniel Brook, A History of Future Cities. Lawrence Wright, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief.

We asked FORBES' editors and writers to select the most entertaining and illuminating nonfiction books of the year. Here are the top 10 volumes they came up with. The Billionaire and the Mechanic: How Larry Ellison and a Car Mechanic Teamed Up to Win Sailing's Greatest Race, the America's Cup , by Julian Guthrie.

Politics and current affairs Drawing on interviews, historical documents, diaries and letters, as well as his own family story, Ari Shavit, a Tel Aviv newspaper columnist mines four generations of history to tease out the conflicts and contradictions in his controversial homeland. A passionate elegy.

To create this lively study of the main players of the two Continental Congresses, Beeman (History/Univ. of Pennsylvania) draws on his wealth of research from his previous, award-winning works, Plain, Honest Men: The Making of the American Constitution (2009) and Patrick Henry (1974). Read full book review >

Amazon.com: Nonfiction - Best Books of 2013: Books

A lot of fine business books were published this year. Big Data helped to popularize one of the catchiest business terms of the year. Who Owns the Future? stirred our thoughts on the relationship between technology and culture. But one book really took the prize.

In business books this year, tech companies stole the show: From Fred Vogelstein's account of Apple and Google's battle for world domination, "Dogfight" to Nick Bilton's no-holds-barred "Hatching Twitter," this year's best business reads were chock full of juicy revelations about what it's like behind the scenes at the tech corporations and social media startups that've transformed our relationships with gadgets, media and the web.

Top 10 business books of 2013

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ECONOMICS The Bankers' New Clothes: What's Wrong with Banking and What to Do About It, by Anat Admati and Martin Hellwig, Princeton, RRP£19.95/$29.95 This is the most important book to have come out of the financial crisis. It argues, convincingly, that the problem with banks is that they operate with vastly insufficient levels of equity capital, relative to their assets.

And...the 2013 800-CEO-READ Book Awards are underway! Over the course of this week, we will be posting the shortlist selections for our 8 business book categories: General Business, Leadership, Management, Innovation/Creativity, Small Business/Entrepreneurship, Marketing/Sales, Personal Development, Finance. Then on Monday, December 16th, we'll announce the 8 category winners!

Over the course of this week, we will be posting the shortlist selections for our 8 business book categories: General Business, Leadership, Management, Innovation/Creativity, Small Business/Entrepreneurship, Marketing/Sales, Personal Development, Finance. Then on Monday, December 16th, we'll announce the 8 category winners!

1. Lawrence Wright, Going Clear: One of the problems with recruiting intelligent, creative people to your fledgling religion is that they may one day revolt and do their best to...

The contentious and often tawdry negotiations that went into passing the Dodd-Frank financial reform act in 2010 are at the heart of this book by an associate editor of The Washington Post.

Over the course of this week, we will be posting the shortlist selections for our 8 business book categories: General Business, Leadership, Management, Innovation/Creativity, Small Business/Entrepreneurship, Marketing/Sales, Personal Development, Finance. Then on Monday, December 16th, we'll announce the 8 category winners!

Over the course of this week, we will be posting the shortlist selections for our 8 business book categories: General Business, Leadership, Management, Innovation/Creativity, Small Business/Entrepreneurship, Marketing/Sales, Personal Development, Finance. On Monday, December 16th, we'll announce the 8 category winners!